Cambridge, MA It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by Ryan O'Le...

Cambridge, MA Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, along with colleagues elsewhere in the United States and the United Kingdom, have discovered the most distan...

About eight billion years before our own sun formed, the universe underwent a period of dramatic star formation. Galaxy collisions were frequent back then, and those interactions prompted...

Astronomers are on the threshold of discovering the Holy Grail of planetary sciences - new Earth-like planets. The next challenge will be to determine whether or not these worlds have lif...

Supermasssive black holes - giants with masses of millions or billions of suns - are relatively famous because they reside at the nuclei of galaxies like quasars where they are responsibl...

On April 16, 2009, Lester M. Cohen was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service medal "...For your crucial and hugely significant role in the development of the lightweight telescope...

Among the approximately 340 extra-solar planets known to date are 58 that were discovered because they transit their stars (that is, their orbits take them in front of their stars as seen...

Supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars. These cataclysms disburse into space all of the chemical elements that were spawned inside the progenitor stars, while adding to them...

Cambridge, MA The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) will have three of its facilities featured in a live 24-hour video webcast called "Around the World in 80 Telescopes."...

Dust is scattered throughout space, and is composed of fine particles of silicates like sand on earth, or of carbon (often blended with other elements). The dust strongly absorbs light at...